After a weekend at my local anime convention, I was excited to sling some cardboard tonight at Locals.
I brought along a new deck that I was itching to test out, Ice-Wind Crystals, and shuffled the ever-loving daylights out of it in preparation. We had 6 players show tonight, which gave us a three-round event.
A three-round event that frankly kind of fried my brain a little bit. Brand new control list after a draining (if fun!) weekend will do that, I suppose.
Round 1 vs Category MBM - Win
The first test of my new deck and...
Man, I almost feel bad for how this went. I wound up with all three Remnants in play, each having removed a different Remnant from my Break Zone, giving me a ton of Crystals just off of the three of them, plus having Kadaj's end-of-turn discard effect fully up and active. Between Kadaj, Yazoo's Dull-Freeze ability, and general ability to keep my opponent's Fowards under control, this was pretty decisively a game in my favor.
Round 2 vs Category VIII - Win
Two Ice Decks, clashing against one another.
This game was slow. And grindy. And exhausting. Neither of us really had room to make a lot of headway against the other, chipping away at one another for one or two damage over the course of multiple turns. I successfully cast the 8-cost Bartz for his alternative cost of three Crystals on turn two, and unfortunately I hit two of my three copies of the 4-cost Shantotto, neither of which I could play off of Bartz. Still, effectively drew two cards, so it could've been worse.
Like I said, neither of us could really make a ton of headway against one another, with my Dull-Freeze effects doing a ton of work - Yazoo being able to hit a Backup was clutch, as it kept my opponent's Cid Kramer locked down, keeping access to "every" element out of their reach, plus the resource denial that locking one of their three Backups down provided. Seymour eventually joined Yazoo in keeping things locked down. An "online" Kadaj stripping their hand away helped a lot as well, since it meant they were being forced to play from their top-decks.
This game, it felt like I had a hard time generating Crystals, but as my opponent pointed out to me, I really didn't. I was generating Crystals left, right, and center, but I was also immediately spending those Crystals on things like playing Bartz, or using my Remnants' abilities.
Ultimately, after a long, long game, I took the win by swinging big and "overextending" some damage into their board, then using Shantotto's from-hand ability to Dull their entire board before they could crack back and take me out on their own turn.
Round 3 vs Sky Pirates - Win
And right after frying my brain with the Cat VIII game, I got another round against an opponent with a difficult deck for me to work around.
Fortunately, my opponent played the game less aggressively than they really should have, giving me time to get some amount of setup, and while I again felt like I had a rough time building up Crystals, that honestly really wasn't the case - I was just spending them almost as soon as I was collecting them. My one copy of Spiritus hitting the field did a lot of work to help me with some of my Crystal management since I was able to get some slight refunds on a few of my effects, but unfortunately nowhere near enough of them.
They also, thankfully, never saw Ashe. They went through all three of their copies of Basch, but the only Ashe they saw was used to drop a Kites into play because they weren't expecting me to be able to use my Vaan's Life of Crime special to hit their board for a solid 8k damage. Damage that, thanks to them making a bit of a misplay, took out their 2-drop Yuna along with Balthier, which in turn resulted in Fran going down as well.
From there, I was able to claw my way back to a victory, with Seymour cinching it for me by dull-freezing two of their remaining Forwards and breaking the third. With the damage we'd each dealt to one another, that left me in position to win within a turn or two from there.
Conclusion
My brain hurts.
But man this deck was a lot of fun to play. I'm looking forward to getting some more practice in with it, even if I'm not sure that I'll be able to make it to any other competitive events this season. If nothing else, I'd like to get to the point that I don't need to think as hard about how to handle different situations I find myself in. Being brand new to this control-oriented version of a Crystals list, there were a number of points throughout the night, especially against Cat VIII and Sky Pirates, where I wasn't completely certain what the correct play was, and honestly probably overthought a little bit which contributed to how exhausting it was to play the deck.
But, again, practice. That's what it's for.
No comments:
Post a Comment